A Death of Distinction (22 page)

‘What time did she leave?'

‘She caught the early bus. She doesn't drive. I offered to take her, but she wanted to go alone.'

Mayo thought for a minute or two. ‘All right, Marc, I think that wraps up that bit.'

‘I can go?' His eyes flickered, he seemed momentarily disorientated. Maybe he hadn't expected to be let off so lightly, but he soon recovered and began to lever himself up, ready to go.

‘Not yet.' Mayo waved him to stay where he was. ‘There's something else I want to talk to you about.' And as Marc subsided, he said, ‘You haven't asked how Miss Kitchin was murdered. Aren't you interested?'

‘Not particularly, but I should imagine that someone bashed her over the head, or strangled her.'

After a long, considering look, Mayo spoke deliberately. ‘No. She wasn't strangled, or hit on the head. She was stabbed, Marc. Stabbed with one of her own knitting needles.'

He made a choking sound, quickly turned into a cough. ‘I'm sorry, but that's – well, if you'd known what she was like with that knitting! She never had it out of her hands, drove you round the bend, watching her.' The final irony of the murder weapon evidently afforded him some grim amusement.

It was not shared by Mayo. He let a few moments pass, then said abruptly, ‘What's your interest in Flora Lilburne?'

Any amusement, if that was what it had been, faded from Marc's face. The atmosphere was suddenly charged. His facial muscles stiffened, and he appeared to find difficulty in answering.

‘Fancy her, do you?'

He swallowed hard. ‘If you must put it like that. I like her. I've asked her to go out with me.'

‘I know you have, Marc, and she's refused. But you still go on pestering her.' Marc said nothing, still white round the mouth. ‘Did you know her father – the Governor of Conyhall Young Offenders' Institution? The one who got blown up, you remember?'

‘Of course I remember. That's how I got to meet Flora – she was injured in the same accident –'

‘Accident? That's one way of looking at it. But what I asked you was, did you know the governor?'

‘No, I didn't, I never clapped eyes on him. Why should I? And I don't see what all this has to do with Avril Kitchin's murder.'

‘Neither do I, Marc. Not yet. But take my advice, lad. Keep away from Miss Lilburne, or you'll find yourself in trouble. She's said no and she means no. And so do we.'

A mixed-up lad, if ever there was one. Dangerously on the edge of obsession, and not only over his determined perusal of Flora Lilburne. Overprotective of his mother, perhaps with more reason than her unhappy past indicated. Why? Pondering on the situation, Mayo was becoming more and more certain that not only was Marie-Laure their prime suspect for the murder of Avril Kitchin, but that she was the key on which the Lilburne case turned. Questions abounded. Why had she come back to Lavenstock, the last place one would have thought she'd wish to return to? Why had she now fled back to what had for the last years been, as Mayo saw it, her self-imposed prison? Was it the need of confession, to absolve herself of guilt? To hide? he wondered, vaguely remembered history lessons of medieval fugitives in sanctuary crossing his mind. Or had she simply been pulling the wool over Marc's eyes, pretending she needed to seek advice from the Mother Superior at the convent, when really it was an attempt to cover up that she was running away, and had never had any intentions of going there?

No satisfactory answers had yet occurred to him when he and Abigail drove down to the convent, to what he persisted in thinking of as the ‘nunnery' – a large, secluded building on the outskirts of an affluent suburb near Stratford upon Avon, set back from the road, behind the reputedly expensive girls' school that was run by the nuns.

‘Funny how-d'you-do, her living here all that time after she came out of prison,' he commented as they swept up the weed-less gravel drive, adding a few terse remarks as to what the parents of these privileged girls would have said had they known a convicted murderess had been teaching their daughters.

‘Oh, I don't know. Wouldn't like to guess at the backgrounds of some of the teachers at my comprehensive!'

Mayo tut-tutted. ‘So young, and yet so cynical! They couldn't have been so bad. They got you to university, didn't they?' It was against his principles to believe that what you were didn't matter, that it was possible to separate your public and private persona.

‘I'd like to think I'd something to do with it, as well.'

‘Ouch!' He grinned, and they left the car and walked towards the heavy front door. He wasn't precisely sure what he was hoping to gain from this visit – except that Marie-Laure was a woman at the centre of two murders, perhaps three, and that even if he wasn't able to see her in person, here in the convent was at least one woman who might provide answers to some of his questions, if she so chose.

She faced them, the Reverend Mother Emmanuel, across a highly polished table in a prim, chilly parlour, a pink chrysanthemum in an ugly majolica-type cache-pot dead centre of the table. He'd half expected to see a woman in a great starched headdress and a long black habit, but she wore a sober, calf-length dress in dark blue, a simple veil and wimple, and a rosary at her breast. She had steady blue eyes in an austere face that might have been carved from wax. Her speech was clearly modulated, classless but pedantic. She looked about sixty, but her life might equally have added to, or taken years from, her real age.

It was barely three months since Marie-Laure had left the convent, she told them, after listening attentively to Abigail's brief explanation of why they were here. Then Abigail sat back, her role from now on merely to observe, but the Mother Superior was reluctant to discuss either Marie-Laure's reasons for leaving the convent or choosing to live within it in the first place, except to say that she had known of their community through retreats she'd regularly attended before the tragedy which had befallen her, that it had been a refuge to which she'd turned when leaving prison. ‘Suffice it to say that when she returned here she helped to teach French – and science, her own subject – to the younger girls, until she found courage to face the world again.'

‘Did she tell you why she'd decided to go back to Lavenstock?'

‘She did.'

Mayo waited, and so did she. He was no novice at this sort of game, but he spoke again before the silence became too long, fully aware that in a contest to see who would first break it, he stood no chance.

‘Were they reasons of which you could approve?'

She's got me at it now, talking like a flipping English grammar! he thought, avoiding Abigail's eye.

The Mother Superior's level glance rested momentarily somewhere above his eyebrows, and then she sighed. ‘I see no reason why you shouldn't know, since her motives for returning were entirely laudable. She heard that the people who had adopted her son had died tragically, and she thought he might be in need of her ... she began to feel she had been wrong to have severed all connections with him.'

Mayo studied the serene face. ‘And now? I was told she'd come down here to see you today. If she's still here, may I see her?'

The silence of the house was profound. Thirty women lived here, occupied in the tasks of maintaining themselves and keeping the house immaculate, teaching in the school which accommodated a hundred girls, but not a whisper, not a footfall, not the slightest sound of a closing door could be heard. After a while, the nun opposite, sitting rigidly erect, without touching the chair-back, raised her eyes from her clasped hands. ‘I'm afraid I could not allow that.'

But she
was
here. He said gently, ‘You could be putting yourself in an awkward position. Wasting police time, failure to cooperate might be the least of it.'

Her eyes were lowered over her clasped hands. After a moment she raised them once more to the level of his forehead. ‘She came here because she was in need of spiritual guidance. She is free to stay, or to go whenever she feels so inclined, but I will not force her, nor be a party to anyone else doing so, nor will I allow you to question her.'

It seemed they'd reached deadlock. Was there really nothing he could do? he asked himself, never having had to face such a dilemma before. No, nothing short of obtaining a warrant to search the convent, dragging out the suspect, questioning the Reverend Mother's integrity ... he quailed before the very thought of any such action, not knowing which alternative would be worse. What he wanted to ask was whether she thought Marie-Laure capable of committing a second murder, but the question froze on his lips. He would in any case receive no direct answer, he knew. So he phrased it rather differently, asking carefully, feeling as though he were walking on eggshells that he mustn't break. ‘Would you act otherwise if I told you we've reason to believe she's deeply involved in this second murder?' There he went again.

She'd provided the weakest coffee he'd ever tasted, and fig-roll biscuits. He manfully drained his cup but abandoned the biscuit, which was sticking to his teeth, mentally awarded Abigail several brownie points when he saw she'd finished hers, wondering whether the nuns were forced to eat them as penance.

‘If that question were a matter of academic debate, I would enjoy taking you up on it,' the Mother Superior said at last, and Mayo had no difficulty in believing that she would, noticing the spark of animation which flashed across her face as she spoke, making him wonder what she had been ‘in the world'. ‘But as I presume it is not ...'

He sighed. ‘As it isn't, you won't.'

‘As things stand, I need to consider it. And to pray, Superintendent,' she said simply.

‘And there's no answer to that,' Mayo remarked gloomily to Abigail, as they drove back.

Flora Lilburne was painting her face, always a serious undertaking. And thinking deeply while she did it, which was not as painful for her as some would have liked to make out.

Contrary to the impression given by the way she dressed, her light-hearted approach to life and the sexy figure with which Nature had endowed her. Flora wasn't the shallow, air-headed bimbo she seemed to be. She was quite aware that was what people thought and it gave her a flick of amusement ... She was never going to qualify for
Brain of Britain,
right, but she had more sense than she was given credit for. And more discrimination – Anthony, for instance, was the only man she'd ever slept with, and that only after she was as sure as she could be that they were right for each other.

She blotted her Red Forever lips, added a touch of gloss, picked up a thick, soft brush and lightly stroked amethyst shadows above her right brow. Catching sight of the silverframed photo of her father on her dressing table, for a moment her lips quivered. But she breathed deeply and the dangerous moment passed.

Her dearest da had wanted nothing more for her than to be happy – how often had he told her this? So, happy she'd be. Never mind the hurt that she had to push away, bury deep, deep down, the tears that sometimes, alone or with Anthony, soaked her pillow. As for the bad dreams – well, they couldn't last for ever. And after the initial, debilitating shock of the tragedy, she'd found a new energy in herself, as if the trauma of losing Da, not to mention her own near approach to extinction, had made her see how precious life was, made her feel there wasn't a moment to waste.

And that was just what she was doing, she told herself – wasting too much of it lately on thinking what to do about Marc Daventry. The thought was sobering.

She brushed the left brow to match the right and, satisfied with the result, stood up, smoothed her frock down over her hips and stood by the window, looking put over the garden. She knew she ought to do something about the Marc situation – and do it herself. She couldn't expect her mother to cope with it and it was no use hoping that Anthony would dash along on a white charger, ready to slay dragons. He'd be perfectly willing to have a go at slaying dragons or anything else for her – darling Anthony – but he'd probably steer his horse in the wrong direction and forget his sword.

She'd have done something already if only she knew what. If she'd had any sense, she wouldn't have encouraged Marc in the first place, though she'd only thought she was being nice to him when he kept popping into her room at the hospital to see how she was. At first, she'd shrugged it off, thinking he'd soon get over it. But he was refusing to take no for an answer ... flowers, chocolates, telephone calls ... trying to make out she wouldn't go out with him because he wasn't good enough for her, not in the right social class and all that load of rubbish. As if she cared about that! Of course, you couldn't convince someone properly over the telephone that you wanted nothing to do with them, especially someone who doesn't want to be convinced. That was probably what had made him come to the house last night, to try and talk to her in person, only she hadn't been there. Her mother had, and it had really upset her for some reason, far more than Flora would have imagined. Little things do assume big proportions, though, when you're distracted and unhappy ... and Dorothea had looked awful for some time. Flora worried a good deal about her mother. There was a lot of love between them, if not always expressed.

She'd never before been in this sort of situation. She was beginning to feel a bit – well, uneasy. Nothing more than that, she told herself. It was just an unpleasantness she'd have no trouble in dealing with, once she decided how. But, looking out across the flowering shrubs and the wide green lawns, she shivered.

It was just that he seemed, in some odd way, to be always there, on the edges of her mind. Sometimes, she even dreamed about him, and the way he looked, with those deep, dark eyes that seemed to be trying to compel her to do something she didn't want to do. And it was silly, really, but occasionally, she'd look round and almost imagine him there. Once, she'd been certain she'd seen him in the distance, but she decided it was only the reflection of someone looking in a shop window.